Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lib Sin ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one. Across thousands of shows to reach your target audience and their favorite podcasts with Lib Sin ads. Go to LibSyn ads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N. Ads.com today. I wanted to employ one of my overly torturous metaphors for this episode. And it was going to involve a crowd of fans and paparazzi waiting for a celebrity to make an appearance on a red carpet. But I didn't want to date myself because I'm only vaguely aware of people who are famous in the present moment. And I also wanted to future proof myself so I couldn't just name someone from the present moment that would be forgotten in the unknown future window. Actually, listen to this. So here's what I decide. The metaphor stays because of course it does. But our celebrity is Brad Braddington. I want you to imagine this scene. It's the red carpet. It's the night of the Oscars or the Emmys or the participation trophy ceremony for your kids' soccer game. That's not the essential part of the metaphor. What matters is who's here? Brad Braddington's adoring fans, curious onlookers and of course the paparazzi ready to take their shot. In our analogy, Brad Branddington is a particle and electron, a proton, even a neutrino if it felt like it. The crowd of onlookers and fans, that's the material. It's a substance like air or water or diamond or the inside of your eyeball, which is mostly water and hopefully not much diamond. Oh, and those paparazzi? They're the most important part. I'm talking today with the help of Brad Braddington. It's about something called Chorankov radiation, which I prefer to call light boom but as usual nobody listens to me much. It's called Chorankov radiation because it's named after Soviet physicist, Pavel Chorankov. He didn't really understand what he was seeing but he took great notes and by the time we figured out what was going on, his name was already attached to it, so not bad, Pavel. And he did his work in 1934. He was working in a lab in Moscow and he's doing some really super series, incredibly important science work. He is shining gamma rays into a bottle of water. That's it. That was his experiment. In the 1930s, a lot of particle physics basically boils down to shining and or shooting as object X into target Y, so it's not as lame as it sounds. But he finds that when he shoots the gamma rays into the water, it glows. It's blue, it's faint, it's barely there, but it is there. Now here's the thing. This wasn't the first time anyone had seen this. Mary Curie's lab had noticed the same glow years earlier, other physicists had seen it too. And every single one of them had looked at it and shrugged and written it off as fluorescence. Like some impurity in the water was absorbing the radiation and reamitting it as blue light. Some silly secondary effect, not interesting move along. Pavel looks at it and thinks in the great hallmark of most scientific discoveries, huh, that's weird. And I do have to mention that it said that good scientists don't discover new things. They look at old things in a new way and that's exactly what Pavel did. He's not sure why he's suspicious, but he's suspicious or incredibly bored. So he does what any good curious and or bored experimentalist does when something doesn't sit right, he starts poking at it. He has this blue light in the water when he shines gamma rays on what's going on? So he tries purifying the water and the glow stays. He tries different liquids. The glow changes. Ooh, he varies the energy of the radiation. The glow responds. Ooh, neat. He changes the geometry of the experiment and the glow has a direction. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, back up a bit. What was that last bit? Fluorescence. Glows in all directions equally. It doesn't care which way you're looking at it. But this glow that Pavel was looking at was asymmetric. It was stronger in some directions than others. It was doing something that fluorescence doesn't do. He doesn't know what this is, but it is definitely not fluorescence. Maybe it's Patreon. Patreon.com/PMSuttersHowYou can contribute to this show and maybe it was first discovered in a Moscow lab in 1934. No one can say for certain. Actually, we can totally say for certain because Patreon is a software platform for you and you get the idea. Patreon.com/PMSutters Thank you so much for your contributions. Trenkov spends the next three years characterizing this thing with obsessive precision. He's not a theorist. He can't tell you why it's happening, but he can tell you everything about what it's doing. He measures it. It's intensity, it's direction, it's dependence on the speed of the incoming particles, it's behavior and different materials. He builds up a complete portrait of this phenomenon that nobody understands. He publishes his results and the physics community is mildly interested. I mean, this is in the 1930s. There's kind of a lot going on. Quantum mechanics is still being sorted out. Nuclear physics is exploding literally. The faint blue glow in a bottle of water is not exactly front page news. A few years later, a couple other physicists pick up the mystery and they realize what's going on. What's going on is that it's Brad Brattington showing up at the red carpet. Now, we need to talk about the red carpet. Who's in it? A bunch of atoms, molecules, and stuff. And all this stuff changes how light moves. And if this change didn't happen, then the whole magic around Brad Brattington slash tranchofradiation wouldn't happen. Now, we all know what light is. It is waves of electricity and magnetism. At least in the classical picture, yes, there is a quantum description, but we don't necessarily need that quantum description to understand tranchofradiation. It is, you've got some electricity, you've got some magnetism, the electricity changes, the magnetism changes, they reinforce each other, and off they go, they travel, they propagate just like waves on the top of the ocean propagate. And good old James Clerk Maxwell, when he realized that changes in electric fields can induce changes in magnetic fields and vice versa, and then they reinforce each other and they start traveling, he figured out what that speed was, and voila, it's the speed of light. And that's just a number. It falls out of our understanding of electricity and magnetism. The speed of light is the speed of light. This became the cornerstone of our entire search for relativity that no matter where you looked or how you looked, the speed of light was always the same. But that's the speed of light in vacuum. But what we're talking about is light moving through a substance, moving through material, something if I'm remembering correctly, we all learned in kindergarten. The speed of light changes. When it moves through material, and air is just a little bit slower in water, it's only 75%. Oh, it's maximum speed. In diamond, it's only half. Half. We've even developed materials that can slow down light to walking pace. Now, this slowdown is caused by all sorts of interesting and fun interactions between light and atoms and molecules. I did a whole episode on this before, and the basic thing is you have three different pictures of describing how this all works. One picture is you imagine the waves of electricity and magnetism, interacting with the molecules, and then those molecules start wiggling around. They create their own waves of electricity and magnetism, which then interfere with the initial wave, slows everything down. Another picture lets you imagine tiny, low quantum particles bouncing around like a game of Pichinco. And another picture involves thing called phonons, which is my favorite because it's both the nerdiest and the most accurate. But the how doesn't matter for the story, Pawel Churrenkov, and Brad Braddington. What matters is that it happens. The most important point of this is that light moves slower in materials. That's what we care about. That's what produces Churrenkov radiation. And it can produce Churrenkov radiation because inside of a material, you can out-race light. In the vacuum of space, you can't do it. Nothing is faster than the speed of light and vacuum. But inside of a material, it's a different story. Light gets all caught up on itself. But a particle can just barrel on through, punching its way past all the atoms and molecules while the light is busy getting tangled. So it is possible to go faster than light. You just have to cheat. If light is the you-sane bolt of particles, you can never beat you-sane bolt in the spread. But what if you filled up the stadium with molasses? You might stand a chance if you change the rules. I would still lose, but maybe you have a shot. shot. Okay, enough setup. We have our material. That's the
crowded the red carpet. We have our star particle itself, Brad Braddington. And remember those paparazzi, the ones I said were the most important part? The flashes from their cameras, that is the trink of radiation. That's the light boom. That's what Pavel saw glowing in his little bottle of water in Moscow. So here's how it goes down. Let's say Brad Braddington steps out of his limo and walks at a nice slow pace. There's a huge crowd surrounding the red carpet, absolutely crowding it. So packed that the people in the middle of the crowd and at the edges can't really see him. The paparazzi out there don't even know he's there. So when Brad Braddington steps out, it's only the people right next to the limo that know he's finally stepped out. And what do they do? They scream, they holler, and they take out their phones and start snapping pictures. But it's only the people nearest to him that can do this because they're the only ones who can see him. As long as Brad Braddington walks slowly through the crowd, this this triggering of screaming and taking pictures, the flashes from the paparazzi cameras moves out in all directions from him. He's the focal point. He's the center of the action wherever he is, the people nearest to him are reacting and taking pictures. If you had a bird's eye view of the red carpet, you would see Brad Braddington making his way through the crowd with these rings of paparazzi flashes around him on all sides. Inside a material, Brad is a charged particle. He's moving, but he also carries with him an electric field, a celebrity aura, if you will. That electric field influences all the atoms and molecules around him. And then they react. They stretch, they squeeze, they twist, they do all the things that atoms and molecules do. And then they step back into place and release a flash of light. These flashes of light move out in all directions from wherever the particle happens to be as it's moving through. If the charged particle, slash Brad Branddington, is moving slowly, then the molecules in front of him learn about his presence right around the same time that the ones to the side do and the ones behind him do. They all take pictures at the same time. They all release light at the same time and then everything cancels out in the wash and you don't get any special glow. But let's say Brad Branddington is in a hurry. Maybe he's late, maybe he hates crowds, maybe he really has to pee. Instead of walking slowly, taking his time, letting all the paparazzi get their shots from all directions, front, side and back, he leaps out of the limo and absolutely barrels for the entrance. He's shoving people, elbowing, he doesn't care. All the physics here is the same. The same charged particle is moving through the material. It's the same material made of the same atoms and molecules. It's the same flashes of light from molecules near the particle. The only thing that's changed is the speed. That's because the paparazzi have a reaction time. They have to notice Brad's presence before they can react and snap a picture. That reaction time is governed by the speed of light. If we want to get literal, then the light from Brad Branddington from his skin has to literally reach the paparazzi's eye for them to know he's there at which point they take out the camera and take a picture. But the reaction of the paparazzi, the reaction of the atoms and molecules is governed by the speed of light. As long as Brad Branddington or the chart particle is moving slower than the speed of light, everything is in order. All the paparazzi all around him have more than enough time to take their pictures. And for the charged particle, all of the molecules as the charged particle is moving, all the molecules have more than and a time to feel the influence of the particle's electric field, to reconfigure themselves, the snapback and release of flash of light. And it's happening in a circle uniformly around the particle as it's travel. But it's possible if the charged particle and/or Brad Branddington is determined enough to move faster than the speed of light in the material. That means that the paparazzi in front of Brad Branddington don't know he's there until he's already gone. By the time they are aware of his presence, respond, pull out their cameras and take a picture, it's only ever from the sides and back. No one gets a front view picture of Brad Branddington. In our material, the flashes of light created by the passage of the charged particle are now only ever behind or to the sides of the particle, which means they don't get to cancel out, which means they pile up up on each other in a cone. This is a sonic boom but made of light, hence a light boom. This is Trankov radiation. And what does Trankov/ Brad Branddington get us? Well, let's find out after a brief commercial break. One of the most visceral sources of Trankov radiation are reactor pools in nuclear power plants, where you have high energy, fission reactions releasing tremendous amounts of high energy charge particles. And then the water is being used to cool and moderate the reactions to regulate the temperature. And so you have a material where the speed of light is slower than the speed of light and vacuum because it's not a vacuum. It's a water. You have charge particles screaming through coming out of the reactor core into the water. They're racing through that material. As they race through, they leave behind a weight of flashes of light of the molecules in the water, the water itself reacting to the presence of these charged particles, stretching out, twisting and then snapping back into place and releasing a bit of light. But all of that is happening in a wake behind the particle because the atoms, the water molecules in front of the charge particle don't know it's there because it's outracing the speed of light in the material. Nature does this itself without our help. Of course, it always does. In fact, we are bombarded by Trankov radiation. The speed of light in air is only a little bit slower than the speed of light in vacuum, but it's enough. And the earth is constantly struck by cosmic rays. These high energy particles accelerate it to nearly the speed of light in vacuum by things like supernova and hypernova and kilonova and all your favorite novice. Then when that charge particle comes screaming through our atmosphere, some of them are energetic enough to beat the speed of light in air itself, which creates a flash of Trankov radiation as it goes. A downward facing cone of blue light, constantly everywhere forever. It's always there. We're constantly being struck by cosmic rays. This is happening so often that we actually built observatories and telescopes to directly measure this to hunt for cosmic rays instead of looking for the cosmic rays themselves to look at the Trankov light that they emit in the atmosphere in this Trankov light because this is only a high energy process. You have to beat the speed of light in a medium, which means you need to have a lot of energy. And if you have a lot of energy, you do a lot of snapping and twisting of those molecules at a very, very high frequency. This is only ever going to give you high energy light. You're not going to see a red, tinge Trankov radiation. You're only going to see the blue stuff. You see blue light. You see ultraviolet light. And we can build telescopes. We've got magic. We've got Hess. We got Veritas telescopes tuned to the very specific frequencies of light emitted by the light boom of cosmic ray particles screeching through the atmosphere. And then we can see where the flashes are coming from. We can see how spread out they are. We can measure their direction, like depending on where the cosmic rays striking our atmosphere. That wasn't enough for some people, especially people really interested in observing neutrinos. Neutrinos can do this too. They travel faster than the speed of light in a medium in like air or water. Neutrinos themselves are neutral particles, so they themselves can't create Trankov radiation. But sometimes they will strike a molecule which creates a shower of charge particles. And then those create Trankov light. The entire ice cube observatory, which I should do an entire episode on. This thing is insane. It's in Antarctica at the South Pole, where they took strings of detectors and drilled down into the ice, where the whole setup is a cubic kilometer across or in volume. So neutrinos pass through. And then every once in a while they strike a water molecule creates a shower of charge particles. Those charge particles then create Trankov radiation, a light boom in their wake. And then our strings of detectors are just like flash detectors. They just tune to the blue light and they boom, boom, boom, boom, they see the ripple of the light boom as it passes through the Antarctic ice. This is our premier detector for high energy neutrinos. When we want to, you know, how there's that super cameo-kunday detector, this telescope, this giant,
that of ultra pure water surrounded by detectors. Yeah, that's a trink of detector. You wait for the neutrino or a charged particle to pass through the water. Boom, like boom. Brad Brandington has showed up paparazzi, take their pictures, and then we get to see the flashes from the cameras. We even use trink of radiation in medical imaging. Like radiation therapies, we are shooting high energy particles or high energy light into your body. This accelerates particles inside your body to faster than the speed of light inside your body. Brad Brandington is in your in that tumor, which releases a glow of light that we can then detect. And so we can tell if the radiation is on target, if it's doing its job, how effective it is. Brad Brandington to the rescue. Thanks to Ben D and Mark K for the questions that led to today's episode. And please keep those questions coming. It's ask a
[email protected] or the website just ask a spaceband.com. Please keep contributing to the Patreon. I really appreciate it. That's patreon.com/pm-sutter. And don't forget to leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform. It keeps the show visible much like the celebrity aura of Brad Brandington. I'd like to thank my top Patreon contributors this month. They are Justin G. Chris L. Alberto M Duncan M. Corey D. Michael P. Nila Sam R Joshua Scott M Rob H. Scott M. Lewis M. John W. Alexis Gilbert M Rob W Jessica M. Jules R. Jim L David S Scott R Heather Mike S. P. H. Steve S Lisa R Kevin B Eileen G Stephen W. Dev A Michael J Philip L and Stephen B. And I'll see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space. you
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